I see no evidence that MTG, or staff members, are giving a foreign government defense information, or doing anything else in the current Espionage Act. The worst I suspect her of is being an agent of influence, introducing legislation with wording they gave her staff, and AFAIK that’s legal if done without payment.
The theory historically been that without payment, you have no hold against Americans should they change their mind about cooperating. Remember that the outcome of a war, large numbers (123,000 so far by one BBC estimate) of Russians are dying in, likely depends on Trump winning and the GOP then cutting off Ukraine funding. They would be fools not to consider controlling the American congress as a priority.
Maybe Putin’s successor regime will reopen Russian intelligence archives. Without that, it is all speculation. Republicans are deterring the FBI from investigating.
How it must feed her ego to be surrounded by microphones every time she exits doors. To go from a being a shrill Q spouting nonentity to someone whose words the national news media actually quotes. I assume she’ll be booted from every committee once the Dems take over the House.
I’m a little vague on the procedure but I had the impression the representative’s party decided who got on which committee. “We have five seats to fill on the Ways and Means Committee so we’ll fill them with Representatives A, B, C, D, and E. Sorry, Mr. F but this being your first term, we’ve putting you on Ethics and Natural Resources.”
The unfortunate thing about MTG is that she’s shown that the way to command 30x more influence than any of your House peers is to be as crazy as possible.
She’s only 1 out of 435. There’s technically nothing that gives her more power than the other 434. But yet she is kind of like a second-in-command among Republicans in the House.
Typically it works like you describe – at the start of each Congress, the two parties negotiate how many seats each party will have on each committee, and then each party’s leaders decide who specifically will serve in those seats. Then the whole House adopts a resolution to confirm those choices.
But in the House, whatever a majority votes for is what matters. The majority party could refuse to go along with a specific member being assigned committees in the initial resolution, or – more likely – pass a subsequent resolution to remove a member or members from their committee assignments. MTG herself was stripped of her committee assignments during Nancy Pelosi’s Speakership, and Ilhan Omar was subsequently booted off Foreign Affairs when Kevin McCarthy took over.
(The quick version, from what I understand: MTG voted against an anti-Semitism bill because the definition of anti-Semitism that it uses "could convict Christians…for believing the Gospel that Jesus was handed over to Herod to be crucified by the Jews.)
I guess the message intended by the ACLU got garbled by MTG’s lunacy.
In a letter sent to lawmakers on Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) urged House members to vote against the legislation…
“[The bill] would likely chill free speech of students on college campuses by incorrectly equating criticism of the Israeli government with anti-Semitism.”
Matt Gaetz offered the same justification for his vote against the bill — that the bill would codify a definition of antisemitism that recognizes “the Jews killed Jesus” as an antisemitic trope. According to Gaetz, that goes against the Bible.
I don’t know enough about the bill to say whether it’s worth supporting (although it’s clearly a cynical play by Republicans to jump on the current campus protests). But it is delightful to see Gaetz referred to as an “antisemitic pedophile” in print.
I was just happy MTG didn’t molest the big photo of Jeffries like she did the cutout of Trump. And seriously, just how much traction is this Uniparty idea getting?
The Uniparty is a vast organization with thousands of members, none of which have ever become disillusioned with their party or had substantial disagreements with their leaders, and party discipline is such that LaCosaNostra’s omerta is as nothing compared to their apparent vows of silence.